You may have read a lot about the risk of fraud on eBay and come to think that only buyers are being scammed, but you are wrong. Here are a few common scams that target eBay sellers.
I Never Bought Anything!
This scam can be one with the highest risk for a seller to be a victim of. In this case, the valid owner of the credit card still has control of the credit card – no one has stolen the credit card details. However, they may have realized that they can just call the bank that issued the card and say that their card is being used fraudulently and that they did not buy the item, and often the bank will just reverse the transaction without even doing an investigation. The only way to avoid this scam is to make all your sales through eBay, because they keep a record of the transactions.
The Unconfirmed Address
It can be quite easy for scammers to steal a PayPal account from an inexperienced user: all they need is the users email address and password. PayPal does their best to protect against credit cards registered with stolen accounts from being used to make purchases by listing a “confirmed address” for each buyer – an address that matches what the credit card issuer has registered.
Many scammer will ask you to ship to a different address – unless you are certain of them, this is a bad idea, as they could be trying to commit credit card fraud. Especially be wary of anyone who offers to pay a higher price and get overnight shipping, particularly if it is not even in the same country as the confirmed address. The scammer could be trying to make sure the item gets to them before they are found out.
It is up to you to be responsible for fraud on PayPal, as eBay’s preferred way to refund fraudulent payments to their rightful owner is just to reverse it from you! This is considered an occupational hazard of using PayPal, and sellers who have been burned severely at times go as far as moving to a rival electronic payment service. See http://www.nopaypal.com for more information.